Welcome back to our Kiln video journey, where we will see how the project was defined at the start. To -hopefully- maintain the same vision towards the whole process of the video.
Let’s dive in.
From Vision to Conversation
Our journey started with a crucial conversation – a connection with Marie Nicole, Kiln's Head of Marketing.
While there was a draft script in hand, the video began to born as we started to iterate on it.
We explored the intentions driving this project: Kiln's aspirations, who their audience was, and the impact they aimed to make.
This video was mainly aimed to be showcased within an event on a big screen. And as we talked with Marie Nicole, we both agreed that the context of the main audience wasn’t one to watch a whole explanation video to what they did.
There was going to be a voiceover that roughly lays out the services of the company, but on the visual side, we aligned on creating a piece that could serve to attract with their bold branding, and -hopefully- also bold visuals. That also conveyed on what we were talking about.
Balancing Information and Impact
I’m not savvy around scripting. But we can confirm it is more than just writing words; it's crafting a roadmap that guides viewers through a visual experience.
“Collaborative discussions” played a key role in ensuring every phrase contributed in some way to the overarching narrative's precision and impact.
A thing to add here, is that their original script was around 90 seconds. Which of course in ‘normal’ time might seem just a few seconds more. But in an animated video, adding 30 seconds, it probably means a lot more work, effort and budget overall.
So, here, we also worked on synthesizing the script, and make it clear while under 60 seconds.
Sketching through a storyboard
Onto the next phase of our Kiln video journey, we took the vision from the script to sketches. This process transforms ideas into a tangible framework for animation.
Here we try to bridge the gap between words and visuals. References, concepts, and design elements converge to define the look and feel of the video.
The intention here is to bring the script into a visual story. Using visual metaphors, or being literal, the idea is to communicate what we have written into something that reads through the video.
Also, in this case of being an animated project, we don’t only think in shots, elements, etc. But sometimes we already bring some of the animation treatment to it.
It’s not the main focus, but just a glance.
And after a few back-and-forths on sketches, we started to define that the visual universe of Kiln was going to be presented with ‘systems’ that they all live within a universe of the elements (mostly icons and typography) from the new branding.
You will be seeing that each scene is respective to a service, and that service lives alongside a ‘system’ of shapes, movements, behaviors. But that is for the next one :).